My little iPod died yesterday.  Suddenly.  Very suddenly.  Just so all you other iPod kids know, they can go without warning.

I’d just got home from work.  My place of work is within walking distance of my home and unless the weather is looking really ugly I’ll almost always walk it, with iPod on my hip.  Actually, that iPod has become almost a constant companion now on my walks.  Also, when I’m busy puttering around the house doing chores.  So when I get home I check the iPod’s battery meter and it’s looking about half way drained and so I decide to pop it onto its charging stand so it’ll be fully charged for my evening walk.  The moment I sat it down on its charging pad the screen went blank and nothing, Nothing I could do, no pressing or prodding or stroking of any of its controls, could bring it back.

I’m more addicted to that thing then I ever was to my first Sony Walkman.  The first generation Walkmans used cassette tapes and were a blessing for those of us who liked to take long walks or hikes in the countryside, and always wanted our favorite music as a companion.  Before the Walkmans the best you could do was a small transistor radio and a single earplug with the high fidelity of a tin can.  Your only choices were whatever the radio stations you could pick up were playing at that moment, along with all the ads.  With the Walkmans you had great sound quality, no static, and you could play whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, wherever you wanted.  But you were limited to what a single cassette could hold.  That often meant stuffing your pockets with cassettes, and still not having just the right music you wanted to listen to if you changed your mind in the middle of a walk.

When the first CD Walkmans came out they were an improvement, in that you had even better sound quality and the CDs held more music at a time.  But CDs didn’t really fit into a pocket very well, and the first clip-on-your-belt CD players often skipped when jarred, like when you were darting across a road or going up and down stairs.

The iPod is one of those little gizmos that shows how a lot of incremental improvements on a theme can suddenly add up to a revolution given just one more logical step.  Capacity.  I’d never pictured how things might be when I could take damn my whole music library with me everywhere.  Well I can now.  Almost.  I don’t think even 80 gigs is enough to hold all of mine, and half my library is on LPs so converting that is still going to be a bit of work.  But now I can go for a walk, or for a road trip, or on a business trip, and I don’t have to think about what music I should take along.  I just take the iPod with me and I have it all.  It also means I can back it all up so I need never loose any music I’ve bought due to breakage or theft.  No more heartbreak over a broken or lost record.  I can take all my music with me to work.  I can take it with me grocery shopping.  I can take it with me anywhere.  Of course, I still need somewhere to plug in and recharge the little dickens. 

I use my iPod now more then I use my big vacuum tube/solid state stereo system, and that thing used to be on constantly when I was home.  But now when I’m busy with household chores I’ll almost always have the iPod clipped to my belt.  I never did get around to wiring up the whole house for sound, and now I don’t need to.  I can wash dishes, do a laundry, iron my shirts, work in the back yard, paint my porch railings, refill the bird feeders, cook dinner, with the iPod clipped to my belt, feeding my ears any music from my library I want to hear. 

So when I saw that screen go utterly blank my heart sank.  Nooooo…!  I can wait for a repairman to come fix my washing machine, but I need my iPod, Now.  Luckily there is an Apple Store not far away from my house.  But all they could do was confirm that the thing was dead, and to fix it would take weeks possibly, and cost a tad more then half of what a new one would cost anyway.  Since the fix was just to replace the old iPod with a reconditioned one, I was a bit nonplussed that it would take over a week.  Erm…why don’t I just hand you my old one and a hundred and fifty bucks and you just hand me a reconditioned one…?

So I have a new iPod now.  It’s the fifth generation video player one (I really don’t see the use of playing video on an iPod, but maybe that’s because I’m not really watching much TV anymore as it is…).  For the same price as the old one cost me two years ago, the new one holds about 10 gig more, and has a bit more battery life between charges.  And it’s thinner and lighter, so it was a bit too loose in the old one’s hip case.  The new Incase case I bought is a bright electric blue (I’m thinking now I should have bought the pink one…) and protects the iPod inside a bit better then the old ones.  I asked the lady at the Apple support counter to look at the charger for the old one, to make sure it wasn’t the culprit.  She said it was okay, which was a good thing because as it turns out they don’t supply separate chargers with the new iPods.  You’re expected to charge from the computer’s USB port, but I turn Bagheera, the art room Mac which also holds my iTunes library, off when I’m not using it.  So I need the charger.

It’s a bit frustrating that the only fix for these little gizmos is to just completely replace them.  You can’t just open the back, diagnose which part failed and replace it and close it all back up again and hand it back to the customer.  It’s all one little board inside those things, and even the damn battery in an iPod is hard wired into place.  Apple will give you a small discount on a new one if you let them recycle the old one, which eased my mind a bit from an environmental standpoint.  But I still didn’t like it.  At least it’s not all just going into a landfill, but two years isn’t all that great of a lifespan.  My iPod was a forth generation, and I was hoping to at least leap frog over a generation before I bought another one.